Description:
Beyond dead reckoning: mobilities of return in the Pacific / John Taylor -- The diversification of return: Banaban home islands and movements in historical perspective / Wolfgang Kempf -- The Rotuman experience with reverse migration / Alan Howard and Jan Rensel -- Overseas-born youth in Tongan high schools: learning the hard life / Helen Lee -- Agency and selfhood among young Palauan returnees / Rachana Agarwal -- (Be)Longings: diasporic Pacific Islanders and the meaning of home / Kirsten McGavin -- Adding insult to injury: experiences of mobile HIV-positive women who return home for treatment in Tanah Papua, Indonesia / Leslie Butt, Jenny Munro and Gerdha Numbery -- Urban castaways: the precarious living of marooned islanders / Thorgeir Kolshus -- Migration and homemaking practices among the Amis of Taiwan / Shu-Ling Yeh.
In recent decades, the term 'mobility' has emerged as a defining paradigm within the humanities. For scholars engaged in the multidisciplinary topics and perspectives now often embraced by the term Pacific Studies, it has been a much more longstanding and persistent concern. Even so, specific questions regarding 'mobilities of return'--that is, the movement of people 'back' to places that are designated, however ambiguously or ambivalently, as 'home'--have tended to take a back seat within more recent discussions of mobility, transnationalism and migration. This volume situates return mobility as a starting point for understanding the broader context and experience of human mobility, community and identity in the Pacific region and beyond. Through diverse case studies spanning the Pacific region, it demonstrates the extent to which the prospect and practice of returning home, or of navigating returns between multiple homes, is a central rather than peripheral component of contemporary Pacific Islander mobilities and identities everywhere